People around the world can do bizarre things to look different and grab eyeballs. For Karan, a tattoo artist and piercer from Delhi, the desire manifested itself in a risqué procedure which involved getting his eyeballs permanently tattooed.
Yes, you read that right. Eyeballs! This is what Karan looks like now:
Having started tattooing as a hobby since he was 16, it wasn’t long before Karan opened his own studio in Delhi.
He even started tattooing himself for a ‘full body suit’ and six months into it, he began wondering what it would be like to have his eyeballs also tattooed.
Eyeball tattoos, also known as scleral tattoos, are done by injecting ink into the whites of a person’s eyes, writes Priyanka Pant for NDTV. The long-term effects of the procedure however, are unknown, and it can go horribly wrong.
Just recently, a Canadian model nearly lost her eye while attempting to get her eyeballs permanently coloured.
The procedure reportedly costs lakhs of rupees and according to Karan, there was no better person to trust it with than Australian tattoo artist Howard Smith, who Karan says invented scleral tattoos about a decade ago.
In an interview with Cheena Kapoor for DNA, the 28-year-old said that he had wanted to try this for a very long time. “I always wanted to get something like this done and thus made sure that I get it done from the person who invented eyeball tattooing a decade back — Howard Smith,” he said.
Karan said that he has lost the number of times he has gotten inked on his body. He told NDTV that he had uncountable tattoos and 22 body piercings. “Eventually, I will just have one tattoo: head to finger and toe tips,” he said.
The thought of having needles anywhere near your eyes is enough to get the best of us queasy. But Karan claimed that “nothing can hurt him” because pain is merely a perspective. While he admitted that the experience felt like red hot needles entering his eyeballs, he also said, “Pain is just a fear and limitation in the mind.”
In a video Karan posted on his social media after procedure, he claims to have no swelling and that his eyes are healthy.
The procedure however, remains controversial. The Canadian model who became partially blind after a botched attempt wrote about the experience, which she claims “was caused by undiluted ink, over injection, not enough/smaller injections sights (sic)”, on Facebook as well.
Read it here.
Karan however, claimed that it all depends on choosing the professional carefully and it is a completely safe procedure.
(All photos courtesy tattoographer/Instagram)